Battle for 160GB: Hard Disk Drive Roundup Part I. Page 7

After we covered hard disk drives with the highest storage capacity available today in our previous articles, it sounds reasonable now to turn our attention to the other end of the capacity scale. Today we will look at 11 HDD models with 160GB storage capacity from Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital.

Performance in Intel IOMeter

We can’t use the Database and Sequential Read and Write patterns to compare HDDs since these patterns yield a colossal amount of data and putting all this data into one table or diagram would be unreadable. So, if you want to see how the HDDs perform in these patterns, follow this link for tables and diagrams.

We’ll start our comparisons with patterns that simulate the load on the disk subsystem of a server.

FileServer & WebServer Patterns

Red marks the worst results and blue marks the best ones. The Rating column contains the average results of the HDDs which we used to build the following diagram for easier comparison:

Surprisingly, it is the Seagate ST3160827AS – one of the oldest devices in this review – that occupies the first position and with a rather big lead over the others. After it the HDDs have lined up with minimum gaps. Funny enough, Seagate’s products take both first and last places here.

There are two winners in this test, one of which is the same as in the previous one. And both winners are three-headed, i.e. old models. Obviously, the manufacturers don’t think it necessary to optimize their new HDDs for this type of load.